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writing up his case. Such a curious preference in a heterosexual must
have had psychological significance, and could even bear on the
suicide of his wife.
Mahony considers the Wolf Man case history as Freud's "best,"
but does not fully appreciate the full imaginative quality of Freud's
writing. Unlike my own reaction to the Wolf Man-as being a
character out of Dostoevsky- Mahony understands him as having
"endured his miserable life." Mahony is correct in questioning
aspects of Freud's reconstruction of the infantile primal scene which
have been too passively accepted by analysts, and he is skeptical
enough to wonder whether the toddler "saw his parents making love
one, two, three times, in a position from the rear, at five in the after–
noon." Mahony is left "only blinking and wide-eyed" at "Freud's
cameo of stupendous detail. .. ." Other readers, however, by the
time they get to that famous scene, have been overwhelmed by
Freud's literary prowess and have more or less suspended critical
judgement.
In the story of the Wolf Man Freud trumps up his evidence in
behalf of infantile sexuality. But his sleights of hand are being
overlooked in the professional literature. Muriel Gardiner - a pa–
tient of Ruth Brunswick's and apparently the model of Lillian
Hellman's 'Julia" - though a pillar of integrity in contrast to Hell–
man's artistic lies, did shape the material about the WolfMan to suit
the needs of conservative psychoanalysis.
In
Freud and the Rat Man,
Mahony was able to work from a copy
of Freud's original clinical notes, and his most striking conclusion is
that Freud had in his case history engaged in a "fictive manipulation
of time." Freud not only changed events for the sake of constructing
a better story , but treated the Rat Man for only a few months, and
not the one year that Freud claimed . In Mahony's view Freud's
therapeutic results, again in contrast to Freud's version, amounted
to a "symptomatic remission." Freud was engaging in "therapeutic
exaggeration" for the sake of promoting his psychoanalytic cause .
And Mahony makes no bones about Freud having tried to "indoc–
trinate" his patient with psychoanalytic teachings .
Throughout both books Mahony objects to the translations by
James Strachey, his "staid Victorian prose, its cleaning up of Vien–
nese colloquialisms, its reliance on Greek and Latin to render the
familiar in German ... and its tendency to substitute the past and
its toning down for the immediacy and vividness of Freud's present
tense ." Yet like Bruno Bettelheim, Mahony seems to forget that
